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Job One

Healthcare reform, climate change legislation, education reform, even changes in war strategy will all fall short of creating a lasting political program if Americans don’t have jobs. We have a crippling level of under/unemployment, which many believe actually tops 20% today (higher than the 17+ percent reported by the feds), even while the government tells us the recession is now over. Still more Americans fear losing their jobs, or struggle with reduced pay and reduced expectations. This reality is the primary area the Obama Administration must grapple with— and soon.

Next month, the White House will convene a Jobs Summit, bringing together economists, academics, labor leaders, businesspeople, and non-profit groups to discuss putting Americans back to work. While the date of the summit has yet to be announced, a bigger unknown is whether the President will put the government’s money and energy squarely behind the effort; whether he realizes how basic creating jobs is to his success in dealing with every other problem he faces.

The constituencies that gave Barack Obama the victory that brought him to the White House are also the hardest hit by the aftermath of last year’s meltdown. Joblessness in Hispanic and African American communities is at Depression levels now. Young people are similarly without jobs at levels not seen in decades. These constituencies and all the other Americans who joined the political process in 2008 with the anticipation that we might have a better future are now experiencing a present in which hope and opportunity are diminishing daily.

It’s probably unfair to blame a nine-month old Presidency for most of this reality, but fair or not, the economic reality of a jobless recovery will become Obama’s legacy if he does not address it. Even with steady growth in the economy, which is far from a certainty, jobs will remain elusive if there is no strategy to address their creation. At present rates of economic growth, the US economy might not see a “normal” unemployment rate for six or more years to come. This is simply unacceptable, and if left unaddressed will cripple the lives of countless families.

Other countries, like Germany, have not seen the kind of unemployment accompanying the meltdown that has occurred here. This is due, in part, to a web of incentives and government programs there meant to encourage employment— and in part to a different political climate in which incentives are the conservative approach to addressing job creation, as opposed to New Deal style jobs programs. In America, the conservative approach amounts to old-style laissez faireeconomics popular under Herbert Hoover, focusing on business, which sees jobs as overhead, to create them in due time. Due time could be quite a while in the stratified American economy.

President Obama needs to address jobs squarely—or face the consequences of a crippled country, suffering the loss of human potential, open to demagogues, and riddled with lost chances for too many of its citizens. And if none of those specters are serious enough for him, he should consider the loss of political will that accompanies all of the above. Creating jobs amounts to saving his Presidency from the drift and disaster that inevitably follow Administrations that don’t get Americans working again.